Timur (Tamerlane) claimed descent from Genghis Khan’s family. The disturbed conditions in Mongol Transoxania gave this son of a minor government agent in the town of Kesh the chance to build up a kingdom in Central Asia in the name of the Chagatai Khans, whom he eventually supplanted. He entered Iran in 1380 and in 1393 reduced the Jalāyirids after taking their capital, Baghdad. In 1402 he captured the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid I, near Ankara. He conquered Syria and then turned his attention to campaigns far to the east of his tumultuously acquired and ill-cemented empire; he died in 1405 on an expedition to China. Timur left an awesome name and an ambiguous record of flights of curiosity into the realms of unorthodox religious beliefs, history, and every kind of inquiry concerning lands and peoples. He showed interest in Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism that varied from a scholastic study of ascetic techniques for mastering the carnal self to complete abandonment of all forms of authority in the belief that faith alone is necessary for salvation. Sufism had increased in the disturbed post-Seljuq era as both the consolation and the refuge of desperate people. In Sufism Timur may have hoped to find popular leaders whom he could use for his own purposes. His encounters with such keepers of the consciences of harried, exploited, and ill-treated Iranians proved that they knew him perhaps better than he knew himself. Whatever his motives may have been, the reverse of stability was his legacy to Iran. His division of his ill-assimilated conquests among his sons served to ensure that an integratedTimurid empire would never be achieved.

The nearest a Timurid state came to being an integrated Iranian empire was under Timur’s son Shah Rokh (reigned 1405–47), who endeavoured to weld Azerbaijan and western Persia to Khorāsān and eastern Persia to form a united Timurid state for a short and troubled period. He succeeded only in loosely controlling western and southern Iran from his beautiful capital at Herāt. Azerbaijan demanded three major military expeditions from this pacific sovereign and even so could not long be held. He made Herāt the seat of a splendid culture, the atelier of great miniature painters (Behzād notable among them), and the home of a revival of Persian poetry, letters, and philosophy. This revival was not unconnected with an effort to claim for an Iranian centre once more the palm of leadership in the propagation of Sunni ideology: Herāt sent copies of Sunni canonical works on request to Egypt. The reaction, in Shīʿism’s ultimate victory under the Ṣafavid shahs of Persia, was, however, already being prepared.

Western Iran was dominated by the Kara Koyunlu, the “Black Sheep” Turkmen. In Azerbaijan they had supplanted their former masters, the Jalāyirids. Timur had put these Kara Koyunlu to flight, but in 1406 they regained their capital, Tabrīz. On Shah Rokh’s death, Jahān Shah (reigned c. 1438–67) extended Kara Koyunlu rule out of the northwest deeper into Iran at the Timurids’ expense. The Timurids relied on their old allies, the Kara Koyunlu’s rival Turkmen of the Ak Koyunlu, or “White Sheep,” clans, who had long been established at Diyarbakır in Turkey. The White Sheep acted as a curb on the Black Sheep, whose Jahān Shah was defeated by the Ak Koyunlu Uzun Ḥasan by the end of 1467.

Uzun Ḥasan (1453–78) achieved a short-lived Iranian empire and even briefly deprived the Timurids of Herāt. He was, however, confronted by a new power in Asia Minor—the Ottoman Turks. His relationship with the Christian emperor at Trebizond (Trabzon) through his Byzantine wife, Despina, involved Uzun Ḥasan in attempts to shield Trebizond from the ineluctable Ottoman advance. The Ottomans crushingly defeated him in 1473. Under his son Yaʿqūb (reigned 1478–90), the Ak Koyunlu state was subjected to fiscal reforms associated with a government-sponsored effort to reapply rigorous purist principles of Sunni Islamic rules for revenue collection. Yaʿqūb attempted to purge the state of taxes introduced under the Mongols and not sanctioned by the Muslim canon. But the inquiries made by the Sunni religious authorities antagonized the vested interests, damaged the popularity of the Ak Koyunlu regime, and discredited Sunni fanaticism.

This attempt to revive strict Sunni religious values through revenue reform or to effect the latter under the guise of religion no doubt gave impetus to the spread of Ṣafavid Shīʿite propaganda. Another factor must have been related to the same general economic decline that made Sultan Yaʿqūb’s fiscal reforms necessary in the first place. Sheikh Ḥaydar led a movement that had begun as a Sufi order under his ancestor Sheikh Ṣafī al-Dīn of Ardabīl (1253–1334). This order may be considered to have originally represented a puritanical, but not legalistically so, reaction against the sullying of Islam, the staining of Muslim lands, by the Mongol infidels. What began as a spiritual, otherworldly reaction against irreligion and the betrayal of spiritual aspirations developed into a manifestation of the Shīʿite quest for dominion over a Muslim polity. By the 15th century, the Ṣafavid movement could draw on both the mystical emotional force of Sufism and the Shīʿite appeal to the oppressed populace to gain a large number of dedicated adherents. Sheikh Ḥaydar inured his numerous followers to warfare by leading them on expeditions from Ardabīl against Christian enclaves in the nearby Caucasus. He was killed on one of these campaigns. His son Ismāʿīl was to avenge his death and lead his devoted army to a conquest of Iran whereby Iran gained a great dynasty, a Shīʿite regime, and in most essentials its shape as a modern nation-state.

Gone were the days of rule by converted and zealous Sunni Turks or by Mongols of ambiguous spiritual allegiance. Iran’s defilement was removed by the swelling tide of Shīʿism, which bore Ismāʿīl to the throne his family was to occupy without interruption until 1722, in one of the greatest epochs of Iranian history.

The Ṣafavids (1501–1736)

Shah Ismāʿīl

In 1501 Ismāʿīl I (reigned 1501–24) supplanted the Ak Koyunlu in Azerbaijan. Within a decade he gained supremacy over most of Iran as a ruler his followers regarded as divinely entitled to sovereignty. The Ṣafavids claimed descent—on grounds that modern research has shown to be dubious—from the Shīʿite imams. Muslims in Iran, therefore, could regard themselves as having found a legitimate imam-ruler, who, as a descendant of ʿAlī, required no caliph to legitimate his position. Rather, Ṣafavid political legitimacy was based on the religious order’s mixture of Sufi ecstaticism and Shīʿite extremism (Arabic ghulū), neither of which was the dusty scholasticism of the Sunni or Shīʿite legal schools. The dynasty’s military success was based both on Ismāʿīl’s skill as a leader and on the conversion of a number of Turkmen tribes—who came to be known as the Kizilbash (Turkish: “Red Heads”) for the 12-folded red caps these tribesmen wore, representing their belief in the 12 imams—to this emotionally powerful Sufi-Shīʿite syncretism. The Kizilbash became the backbone of the Ṣafavid military effort, and their virtual deification of Ismāʿīl contributed greatly to his swift military conquest of Iran. In later years, though, extremist (ghulāt) zeal and its chiliastic fervour began to undermine the orderly administration of the Ṣafavid state. Ismāʿīl’s attempt to spread Shīʿite propaganda among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia prompted a conflict with the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Following Iran’s defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran, Ṣafavid expansion slowed, and a process of consolidation began in which Ismāʿīl sought to quell the more extreme expressions of faith among his followers. Such actions were largely preempted, however, by Ismāʿīl’s death in 1524 at the age of 36.

The new Iranian empire lacked the resources that had been available to the caliphs of Baghdad in former times through their dominion over Central Asia and the West: Asia Minor and Transoxania were gone, and the rise of maritime trade in the West was detrimental to a country whose wealth had depended greatly on its position on important east-west overland trade routes. The rise of the Ottomans impeded Iranian westward advances and contested with the Ṣafavids’ control over both the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. Years of warfare with the Ottomans imposed a heavy drain on the Ṣafavids’ resources. The Ottomans threatened Azerbaijan itself. Finally, in 1639 the Treaty of Qaṣr-e Shīrīn (also called the Treaty of Zuhāb) gave Yerevan in the southern Caucasus to Iran and Baghdad and all of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans.

Shah ʿAbbās I

The Ṣafavids were still faced with the problem of making their empire pay. The silk trade, over which the government held a monopoly, was a primary source of revenue. Ismāʿīl’s successor, Ṭahmāsp I (reigned 1524–76), encouraged carpet weaving on the scale of a state industry. ʿAbbās I (reigned 1588–1629) established trade contacts directly with Europe, but Iran’s remoteness from Europe, behind the imposing Ottoman screen, made maintaining and promoting these contacts difficult and sporadic. ʿAbbās also transplanted a colony of industrious and commercially astute Armenians from Jolfā in Azerbaijan to a new Jolfā adjacent to Eṣfahān, the city he developed and adorned as his capital. The Ṣafavids had earlier moved their capital from the vulnerableTabrīz to Qazvīn. After eliminating the Uzbek menace from east of the Caspian Sea in 1598–99, ʿAbbās could move his capital south to Eṣfahān, more centrally placed than Qazvīn for control over the whole country and for communication with the trade outlets of the Persian Gulf. ʿAbbās engaged English help to oust the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in 1622. He also strove to lodge Ṣafavid power strongly in Khorāsān. There, at Mashhad, he developed the shrine of ʿAlī al-Riḍā, the eighth Shīʿite imam, as a pilgrimage centre to rival Shīʿite holy places in Mesopotamia, where visiting pilgrims took currency out of Ṣafavid and into Ottoman territory.

Under ʿAbbās, Iran prospered. The monarch continued the policy begun under his predecessors of eradicating the old Sufi bands and ghulāt extremists whose support had been crucial in building the state. The Kizilbash were replaced by a standing army of slave soldiers loyal only to the shah, who were trained and equipped on European lines with the advice of the English adventurer Robert Sherley. Sherley was versed in artillery tactics and, accompanied by a party of cannon founders, reached Qazvīn with his brother Anthony in 1598. The bureaucracy, too, was carefully reorganized, but the seeds of the sovereignty’s weakness lay in the royal house itself, which lacked an established system of inheritance by primogeniture. A reigning shah’s nearest and most acute objects of suspicion were his own sons. Among them, brother plotted against brother over who should succeed on their father’s death. Intriguers, ambitious for influence in a subsequent reign, supported one prince against another. ʿAbbās did not adopt the Ottoman sultans’ practice of eliminating royal males by murder (as a child he had been within a hair’s breadth of being a victim of such a policy). Instead, he instituted the practice of immuring infant princes in palace gardens away from the promptings of intrigue and the world at large. As a result, his successors tended to be indecisive men, easily dominated by powerful dignitaries among the Shīʿite ʿulamāʾ—whom the shahs themselves had urged to move in large numbers from the shrine cities of Iraq in an attempt to bolster Ṣafavid legitimacy as an orthodox Shīʿite dynasty.

The Afghan interlude

Ḥusayn I (reigned 1694–1722) was of a pious temperament and was especially influenced by the Shīʿite divines, whose conflicting advice, added to his own procrastination, sealed the sudden and unexpected fate of the Ṣafavid empire. One Maḥmūd, a former Ṣafavid vassal in Afghanistan, captured Eṣfahān and murdered Ḥusayn in his cell in the beautiful madrasah (religious school) built in his mother’s name.

The Afghan interlude was disastrous for Iran. In 1723 the Ottomans, partly to secure more territory and partly to forestall Russian aspirations in the Caucasus, took advantage of the disintegration of the Ṣafavid realm and invaded from the west, ravaging western Persia. Nādr, an Afshārid Turkmen from northern Khorāsān, was eventually able to reunite Iran, a process he began on behalf of the Ṣafavid prince Ṭahmāsp II (reigned 1722–32), who had escaped the Afghans. After Nādr had cleared the country of Afghans, Ṭahmāsp made him governor of a large area of eastern Iran.

Religious developments

As in the case of the early Sunni caliphate, Ṣafavid rule had been based originally on both political and religious legitimacy, with the shah being both king and divine representative. With the later erosion of Ṣafavid central political authority in the mid-17th century, the power of the Shīʿite clergy in civil affairs—as judges, administrators, and court functionaries—began to grow, in a way unprecedented in Shīʿite history. Likewise, the ʿulamāʾ began to take a more active role in agitating against Sufism and other forms of popular religion, which remained strong in Iran, and in enforcing a more scholarly type of Shīʿism among the masses. The development of the taʿziyyah—a passion play commemorating the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn and his family—and the practice of visits to the shrines and tombs of local Shīʿite leaders began during this period, largely at the prompting of the Shīʿite clergy.

These activities coincided with an escalated debate between Shīʿite scholars in Iran and Iraq over the role played by the clergy in interpreting Islamic precepts. One faction felt that the only sound source of legal interpretation was the direct teachings of the 12 infallible imams, in the form of their written and oral testaments (Arabic akhbār, hence the name of the sect: the Akhbāriyyah). Their opponents, known as the Uṣūliyyah, held that a number of fundamental sources (uṣūl) should be consulted but that the final source for legal conclusions rested in the reasoned judgment of a qualified scholar, a mujtahid. The eventual victory of the Uṣūliyyah in this debate during the turbulent years at the end of the Ṣafavid empire was to have resounding effects on both the shape of Shīʿism and the course of Iranian history. The study of legal theory (fiqh), the purview of the mujtahids, became the primary field of scholarship in the Shīʿite world, and the rise of the mujtahids as a distinctive body signaled the development of a politically conscious and influential religious class not previously seen in Islamic history.

This rising legalism also facilitated the implementation of a theory that was first voiced in the mid-16th century by the scholars ʿAlī al-Karakī and Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, which called for the clergy to act as a general representative (nāʾib al-ʿamm) of the Hidden Imam during his absence, performing such duties as administering the poor tax (zakāt) and income tax (khums, “one-fifth”), leading prayer, and running Sharīʿah courts. A strong Ṣafavid state and the presence of influential Akhbārī scholars at first managed to suppress the execution of these ideas, but the complete collapse of central authority in Iran during the 18th century accelerated the already considerable involvement of the clerisy in state and civil affairs, a trend that would continue until modern times.

Nādir Shah (1736–47)

Nādr later dethroned Ṭahmāsp II in favour of the latter’s son, the more pliant ʿAbbās III. His successful military exploits, however, which included victories over rebels in the Caucasus, made it feasible for this stern warrior himself to be proclaimed monarch—as Nādir Shah—in 1736. He attempted to mollify Persian-Ottoman hostility by establishing in Iran a less aggressive form of Shīʿism, which would be less offensive to Ottoman sensibilities; but this experiment did not take root. Nādir Shah’s need for money drove him to embark on his celebrated Indian campaign in 1738–39. His capture of Delhi and of the Mughal emperor’s treasure gave Nādir booty in such quantities that he was able to exempt Iran from taxes for three years. His Indian expedition temporarily solved the problem of how to make his empire financially viable.

Nādir Shāh, painting by an unknown artist, c. 1740; in the Victoria and Albert …

Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

How large this problem loomed in Nādir Shah’s mind is demonstrated by his increasingly morbid obsession with treasure and jewels. After suspecting his son of complicity in a plot against him in 1741, Nādir Shah’s mind seems to have become unhinged; his brilliance and courage deteriorated into a meanness and capricious cruelty that could no longer be tolerated. In 1747 he was murdered by a group of his own Afshārid tribesmen, together with some Qājār chiefs—a sad end to one of Iran’s greatest leaders.

Nādir had been the first modern Iranian leader to perceive the importance of having his own navy, and in 1734 he had appointed an “admiral of the gulf.” Ships were purchased from their British captains, and by 1735 the new Iranian navy had attacked Al-Baṣrah. What really mattered, however, were the land forces. Nādir Shah’s reign exemplified the fact that, to be successful, a shah of Iran had to prove himself capable of defending his realm’s territorial integrity and of extending its sources of wealth and production by conquest. To these ends, Nādir Shah built up a large army composed of tribal units under their own chiefs, such as his Afshārid kinsmen and the Qājār and Bakhtyārī.

But on Nādir Shah’s death his great military machine dispersed, its commanders bent on establishing their own states. Aḥmad Shah Durrānī founded a kingdom in Afghanistan based in Kandahār. Shah Rokh, Nādir Shah’s blind grandson, succeeded in maintaining himself at the head of an Afshārid state in Khorāsān, its capital at Mashhad. The Qājār chief Muḥammad Ḥasan took Māzanderān south of the Caspian Sea. Āzād Khan, an Afghan, held Azerbaijan, whence Moḥammad Ḥasan Khan Qājār ultimately expelled him. The Qājār chief, therefore, disposed of this post-Nādir Shah Afghan remnant in northwestern Iran but was himself unable to make headway against a new power arising in central and southern Iran, that of the Zands.

The Zand dynasty (1750–79)

Muḥammad Karīm Khan Zand entered into an alliance with the Bakhtyārī chief ʿAlī Mardān Khan in an effort to seize Eṣfahān—then the political centre of Iran—from Shah Rokh’s vassal, Abū al-Fatḥ Bakhtyārī. Once this goal was achieved, Karīm Khan and ʿAlī Mardān agreed that Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn Ṣafavī’s grandson, a boy named Abū Ṭurāb, should be proclaimed Shah Ismāʿīl III in order to cement popular support for their joint rule. The two also agreed that the popular Abū al-Fatḥ would retain his position as governor of Eṣfahān, ʿAlī Mardān Khan would act as regent over the young puppet, and Karīm Khan would take to the field in order to regain lost Ṣafavid territory. ʿAlī Mardān Khan, however, broke the compact and was killed by Karīm Khan, who gained supremacy over central and southern Iran and reigned as regent or deputy (vakīl) on behalf of the powerless Ṣafavid prince, never arrogating to himself the title of shah. Karīm Khan made Shīrāz his capital and did not contend with Shah Rokh (reigned 1748–95) for the hegemony of Khorāsān. He concentrated on Fārs and the centre but managed to contain the Qājār in Māzanderān, north of the Elburz Mountains. He kept Āghā Muḥammad Khan Qājār a hostage at his court in Shīrāz, after repulsing Muḥammad Ḥasan Qājār’s bids for extended dominion.

Karīm Khan’s geniality and common sense inaugurated a period of peace and popular contentment, and he strove for commercial prosperity in Shīrāz, a centre accessible to the Persian Gulf ports and trade with India. After Karīm Khan’s death in 1779, Āghā Muḥammad Khan escaped to the Qājār tribal country in the north, gathered a large force, and embarked on a war of conquest.